The Politics of Nature at the Former Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to develop a new approach in Holocaust studies, namely an environmental history of the Holocaust. A case study of the former concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau demonstrates the extent of the entanglement of the politics of memory and the politics of nature, or political ecology, to use Bruno Latour’s term. I suggest that memorials should be treated as an environment, and thus explored as an assemblage of human and nonhuman (f)actors. Analysing both the official preservation strategies adopted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as well as artistic projects (including ?ukasz Surowiec’s Berlin-Birkenau), I consider commemorative practices’ environmental impact. My investigation thus primarily focuses on the role of the figure of the tree-as-witness in preservation work and in the use of powerful herbicides (namely Roundup) in preserving traces of the camp. This study could open the way to further comparative studies of ecocide and genocide.     

旧石器时代石斧的认知考古学研究

艺术应始于人类的早期石斧，手斧的性择标识理论似乎解答了手斧的所有问题，但对该理论还有待更进一步的验证。     

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post-Soviet Bishkek

Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co-constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.     

Nature and source of the gandhara sculptural schist

No definite source localities have been identified for the stones used by the Gandharan sculptors, but it is considered that the predominant rock was an alumina-rich chloritoid-paragonite-muscovite-quartz schist, probably from Swat. A chemical analysis of this rock is presented.     

Stone age predation on large African bovids

Crown height measurements are used to establish age distributions for several species of larger bovids represented in faunal samples from the Middle Stone Age (earlier Upper Pleistocene) deposits of the Klasies River Mouth Caves and the Later Stone Age (later Upper Pleistocene/Holocene) deposits of Nelson Bay Cave, South Africa. There are no obvious differences between the sites in the age distributions of the species they share, but there are significant differences in age distributions among species. Two basic patterns are apparent. In the first, characterizing the blue antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus), roan antelope (Hippotragus equinus), Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer), and giant buffalo (Pelorovis antiquus), the archaeological samples contain numerous very young animals and relatively few prime-age adults. At least in the buffalo samples, there is also a fair representation of old adults. In the second pattern, characterizing the bastard hartebeest (Damaliscus dorcas or D. niro) and especially of the eland (Taurotragus oryx), prime adults are far more prominent relative to younger and older age groups. The first pattern is similar to the natural pattern of attritional mortality that probably characterizes all healthy, stable populations of free-ranging large ungulates, while the second is more reminiscent of the age structure of live herds. The first pattern may reflect hunting focused on individual animals, particularly those whose age made them most vulnerable, while the second may reflect the susceptibility of certain species to driving, so that whole groups could be killed in traps in which differences in age had no meaning.